Montreal City Hall is no stranger to protests

Linda Gyulai, GAZETTE CIVIC AFFAIRS REPORTER08.21.2014

Public sector workers light a bonfire as they protest against proposed pension changes in front of city hall Tuesday, June 17, 2014 in Montreal. Protests at city hall are nothing new, writes Linda Gyulai.

MONTREAL – Sept. 13, 1993. A protest in Montreal turns violent, leading to arrests. Later, a judge sentencing two of the protest leaders to six-month prison terms declares the demonstrators “participated in a violent assault on a public building that was protected by police officers.”

The venue for the protest was Montreal city hall. The protesters were municipal blue-collar employees armed with sticks, hockey helmets and a battering ram. And the convicted leaders were the blue-collar union’s president and secretary-treasurer, who appealed their sentences before eventually serving 29 days each in jail.

“They both played a prime role in the orchestration of a riot ... that was particularly aggressive toward police,” Justice René Dussault, of the Quebec Court of Appeal, said in a 1999 panel ruling against union president Jean Lapierre and secretary-treasurer Denis Maynard.

The episode was far from the only time in the last 25 years that protesters — mostly peaceful — have for different reasons and from different walks of life descended on city hall to demonstrate against the city administration.

Peaceful or not, they have always been met by police officers, usually in riot gear, occasionally hitting their shields in unison to intimidate demonstrators into retreat and sometimes making arrests.

Always, that is, until a spate of protests at Montreal city hall over the past two months.

The demonstrators at the recent protests, one of which featured a bonfire in the middle of Notre-Dame St. E., and the invasion of city council chambers on Monday, are once again city employees.

But this time the object of their frustration — the Quebec government’s Bill 3, which would raise municipal pension plan costs for employees — affects Montreal police officers’ pocketbooks as much as those of their municipal colleagues.

Suddenly, there is no riot gear, no hitting of shields and there are no arrests.

In fact, the small number of police officers standing around as protesters ransacked council chambers on Monday night was on a par with the police presence as 100 children, parents and little-league umpires chanted “We want baseball” in protest in the Hall of Honour in 1996 after the city cut funding for baseball and other city recreation programs.

Critics have been quick this week to harp on the police, in particular, and to point out their apparent blind spot when it comes to aggressively suppressing recent anti-austerity protests by Quebec students but standing passively when the government austerity measures being protested affect them.

The police in 2005 had no qualms about arresting and hauling off five retired city blue-collar workers, including an amputee in a wheelchair, who had chained themselves to tables and chairs inside council chambers to protest against a lack of indexation of their municipal pensions.

Raucous protest is nothing new for some of the city’s unions, notably the blue-collars and the firefighters, whose labour conflict with the city administration between 1997 and 1999 produced punctured fire hoses, intimidation of fire chiefs and the spraying of deer urine in supervisors’ offices.

Yet the involvement now of Montreal police officers, who have rarely participated in protests in the past 45 years, has caused pundits and editorial writers to suddenly fret about a mounting municipal employee insurrection, said Michel Grant, who teaches industrial relations at Université du Québec à Montréal.

Their concern is over the top, he said firmly.

“This is not 1969,” Grant said, referring to a 16-hour wildcat strike by Montreal officers 45 years ago that became known as the “night of terror.”

Police walked off the job over a pay dispute, and their absence sparked bank robberies, shop looting and violent protests, including one by taxi drivers who tried to burn down the garage of a limousine company that had exclusive rights to do pick ups at the airport. The rampage left a Quebec provincial police officer dead.

Montrealers have grown accustomed to relative labour and social peace over the last 30 years, so Monday’s protest and even police officers’ decision to ditch uniforms for camouflage pants as a pressure tactic in the Bill 3 protest have shocked the public, he said.

“People see officers in pink pants and they say it’s terrible, but I say ‘You haven’t seen anything,’ ” Grant said, referring to the 1969 police strike.

“Even if they’re wearing pink pants, health and public safety aren’t threatened. But in 1969, health and public safety were threatened because the police left their jobs.”

And, Grant said, “the political and social climate was very militant at that time. We had many strikes.”

In fact, it was out-and-out labour rebellion across Quebec in 1972 as a “common front” of public-sector unions called a general strike that led to the jailing of workers and union leaders.

“That’s why I don’t refer to this as a crisis,” Grant said of the current municipal pension protest. “To me, a crisis is what we had in ’69 or even ’72.”

He calls the current episode “turbulence.”

That said, Grant noted that union leaders are distancing themselves from Monday’s protest and said he expects union leaders will try to rein in members to prevent a repeat.

“I’m sure labour leaders have the intelligence to know that the people who did this on Monday night were like hockey players scoring on their goal,” he said. “They didn’t help their cause.”

Still, whether it’s rebellion or mere turbulence, there’s no reason for the public to tolerate the mess of this week, Hampstead Mayor William Steinberg said.

“What happened on Monday night is totally unacceptable, both the actions of the firefighters and the inaction of the police officers,” he said. “This is an attack on democracy. There’s no way to sugar coat it.”

Steinberg, a member of the island council’s public security committee, which oversees the police, is a psychologist with experience in evaluating employee morale.

He cautioned against painting all municipal employees with the same brush in the wake of the protest on Monday given that only a minority of police officers and firefighters were present. At the same time, however, he said the people involved “must be treated in the harshest possible terms. And if the police are not able to do that, then I believe the SQ (Sûreté du Québec) should be called in.”

Steinberg also pointed a finger at management. The police and fire departments should take a tougher stand to prevent even minor violations of the rules, such as deviating from uniforms.

“If I was in charge, I wouldn’t even tolerate red baseball caps, camouflage pants and stickers on cars that deface public property,” he said, adding that it can lead to an escalation and a loss of credibility for police and firefighters.

The employees have ample ways to protest legally, while off-duty, including demonstrations, opinion pieces in newspapers and online petitions.

Former city councillor Marcel Sévigny was a Montreal police officer in 1969 and recalls striking officers jamming police radio frequencies and blocking provincial police officers from doing their work.

“It was a major crisis, obviously.”

Like Grant, Sévigny said he doesn’t see a return to 1969, even if unions continue protests and pressure tactics.

“It was a rather special time,” he said. “I think the context is a bit different today.”

What’s surprising is not that the police, like other municipal employees, are reacting to what they view as an attempt by the government to roll back on contracts and pension agreements they negotiated in good faith, Sévigny said. It’s that the government of Premier Philippe Couillard decided to take on all the municipal unions with Bill 3.

“If I were a liberal politician, I would try to negotiate something with the police so they don’t indirectly support the protests,” he said, sarcastically.

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